2
TLDR? Is this another "all CPU chips are CIA sponsored, gotta homebrew your own motherboard to be safe"
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
2 points (51.8% liked)
Privacy
35323 readers
860 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Duh , what do you think Intel IME doing or AMD PSP?
Tl;dr, 3 new revelations:
- The NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) – the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications – as a successful example of a “SIGINT-enabled” CPU supplier. Cavium, now owned by Marvell, said it does not implement back doors for any government.
- The NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: “You talk, we listen.” The NSA and/or GCHQ has also compromised Key European LI [lawful interception] systems.
- Among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.
It looks more like she's saying that the tweet about Applebaum is less important, not the article about him
Whittaker's phrasing is ambiguous. Could be read as expressing one of a number of things:
- The paper/article is misleading and distracting from meaningful threats to privacy.
- That the original tweet is using misleading accusations to distract us from the article's revelations of meaningful threats to privacy.
- That Appelbaum's authorship of the research is an unwanted negative association which undermines the attention deserved by the threats documented in the paper which are misleadingly justified as necessary by eg. governments.
It's difficult to know without a better understanding of Whittaker's position on the various matters at hand, so I don't know.
And if we can't tell for sure, it's stupid to start pointing fingers. If you don't have the facts, reading your (general) own narrative into her very short statement and presenting that as the objective truth is irrational. That's how conspiracy theories are made.
Personally, it sounds like the person on top is recommending backdoors to "protect the children," and Whittaker is rightly pointing out that that's a stupid take, given who is in charge in various governments and the dumb reasons many of them have used as justification for implementing backdoors.
Exit: clarification
OP, you may want to edit the title. It's as other commenters mentioned. It is about Applebaum not the whole article.